Now, master and disciple came riding on together until they drew rein at the head of the mountain gate and looked: it was indeed a monastery. Behold:

Master and disciple have ridden all day, and here at last is a roof. 卻說 — "now, to return to" — is the storyteller picking his thread back up from the close of the last chapter, the old equivalent of "meanwhile." A 山門, literally "mountain gate," is the formal outer gate of any Buddhist house, and the name sticks whether or not there is a mountain within a hundred lǐ of it. 但見那 — "and this is what met their eyes" — is the cue for a set-piece description in the form called 賦 (fù), a rhapsody: long, unrhymed, built out of matched pairs of lines, and reserved for anything the storyteller thinks worth staring at.

Hall upon hall, tier upon tier; galleries and chambers ranged in rows.

The description opens by doubling everything in sight: 層層 ("storey upon storey") set against 疊疊 ("piled and piled"). Repeating a syllable like this is the oldest move in Chinese descriptive writing, and it turns a count into a mass. 殿閣 are the halls and pavilions; 廊房 the cloister-rooms that ring a temple court.

Beyond the triple mountain gate, ten thousand shafts of coloured cloud lie towering and thick;

三山門 is the triple gateway of a monastery, its three portals standing for the three gates of liberation (三解脫門). 巍巍 (wēi wēi) is loftiness. 萬道 counts the shafts of cloud with 道, the measure-word for a streak of light — the one Chinese still reaches for when counting a flash of lightning or a beam of sun.

before the Hall of the Five Blessings, a thousand strands of crimson mist coil and glow.

The 五福 or Five Blessings come from the 《尚書·洪範》: long life, wealth, health, love of virtue, and a natural death at the end of it. A hall named for them is a hall named for a good life fully used up. 豔豔 (yàn yàn) glows; 遶 (rào) is the older way of writing 繞, "to wind about." 萬道 in the line before and 千條 here answer each other exactly: ten thousand against a thousand, shaft against strand.

Two lanes of pine and bamboo, one grove of juniper and cypress.

篁 (huáng) is tall bamboo; 檜 is guì, the juniper-cypress, and not huì. An avenue is set against a grove — and the next two lines will pick up each in turn, a doubling this form loves: name two things, then take them one at a time.

Two lanes of pine and bamboo: without a year, without a reckoning, pure and secluded of themselves;

無年無紀 — "no years, no reckonings" — puts the trees outside the calendar altogether. 清幽 names the cool seclusion that monastic verse prizes above nearly everything.

one grove of juniper and cypress: full of hue, full of colour, proud and lovely as they please.

有色有顏 answers the 無年無紀 of the line above, affirmation for negation, character for character: has-has against no-no. 傲麗, "proud beauty," is a striking pairing — the evergreens are handsome precisely because they snub the seasons.

See too the bell tower and the drum tower rising high, the stūpa-pagoda standing sheer.

鐘鼓樓 are the paired bell tower and drum tower that flank a monastery court, and the bell is about to matter a great deal. 浮屠 (fú tú) began as a way of writing buddha in Chinese sound, then slid across to mean the stūpa, the tower raised over relics — so one word ends up doing duty for the Buddha and for the building. 峻 (jùn) is sheerness.

Monks settled in meditation compose their nature; birds crying in the trees make an idle music.

安禪 is to settle into dhyāna, seated meditation; 定性 is to still the nature, 定 being the technical term for samādhi, absorbed concentration. Against that fixity indoors, the birds outside are 閑 (xián) — at leisure, off duty. Stillness within, ease without, and the line holds the two in balance.

Still and free of dust — truly still; pure and void, possessed of the Way — pure and void indeed.

A couplet — a matched pair of lines, which is the unit this kind of description is built out of — and this one ends by repeating its own words and then vouching for them: 真 ("truly") and 果 ("indeed"). 塵 is the world's dust, the Buddhist word for everything that sticks to a person. 清虛, "pure vacancy," is Daoist. The description closes by plaiting the two vocabularies together, which is what this novel does at every turn.

A poem says:

詩曰, "a poem says," is the storyteller's tag for a capping verse. What is odd is where it falls — between two set-pieces, the long description just finished and, about to begin, a quatrain: a four-line poem, seven characters to the line, the commonest short form in Chinese. So the monastery is described twice over before anybody speaks or does a thing.

A lofty monastery, a Jetavana hidden in a kingfisher hollow; a temple's rare prospect, outdoing the Sahā world.

剎 is read chà, from Sanskrit kṣetra, a Buddha-field, and never shā; so 上剎 is an "eminent monastery." 祇園 (qí yuán) is the Jetavana Grove where the Buddha preached, and the character 祇 reads qí here — not to be confused with the 神祗 of the last chapter. 招提 (zhāo tí) is yet another borrowed word for a monastery; 娑婆 (suō pó) is Sahā, the world of endurance, meaning this one, where things have to be put up with. In two lines the poem has reached for three separate loan-words to say "temple."

Truly, the Pure Land is a scarce thing among men — yet of the empire's famous mountains, the monks hold most.

淨土 is the Pure Land. The second line, 天下名山僧占多, was already a saying by the Ming: of all the realm's famous peaks, the clergy have taken the greater share. Everything turns on 占 (zhàn), "to occupy" — a word for holding ground, not for giving it up. The line admires and needles in the same breath, and it is the first hint that these monks are worldlier than their spotless robes suggest.